Dragon Age 2 - David Gaider Interview @ SC

David Gaider has been interviewed at Sarcastic Gamer about the storytelling in Dragon Age 2:

Why did you take the decision to have just one main character for DA2 as opposed to the multitude of main character options in Origins?

Part of that is budgetary. If you look at Origins each of those origin stories was a huge undertaking. That kind of expense is great, as long as there is some impact to it and I think we got that in Origins. I think it was really important as Origins had to introduce the world and introduce every slice of life to the player. For the DA2 story, we actually started off with multiple starting points but we found that prevented us from telling the tale we wanted to tell and not to mention led to an extra expense. Splitting the story at the start diluted the story we wanted to tell further down the line. For example, if the player was a Dwarf you could not have a Mage in the family. For every variation you have to provide a whole new path. One day we just sat down and said, budget aside, what is more important to us?

When I first found out we were concentrating on one main character, as a writer I wasn’t exactly thrilled. From a writing perspective it narrows down the character. It does give you the opportunities to hook a story onto a character when they are a little bit more defined and now I do find after playing DA2, I have a really hard time going back and playing Origins.

Thanks to Omega for this and several other items.